



in the Citij of fpur ^orfe 



a i^ 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON 



June 8, 1902 






Baccalaureate Sermon 



PREACHED 



IN THE GYMNASIUM OF 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



TO THE CLASS OF 1902 



BY 

The Right Reverend FREDERICK BURGESS, D.D. 
Bishop of long island 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
June 8, 1902 



1 



V 



NEW YORK PUBL. LIBR, 

IN EXCHANGE. 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 



First Cor. : IX : 24, 25 : Know ye not that they which 
run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run 
that ye may attain. And every man that striveth in the games 
exerciseth self-control in all things. Now they do it to obtain 
a corruptible crown; but we are incorruptible." 

A BACCALAUREATE sermon, so the dictionary says, 
should be one of advice to those who have taken 
their first degree in a university, and I feel honored this 
afternoon that the President of your great university has 
delivered you young men into my hand for one half hour 
at least that I may be your preceptor and guide. 

Of course the great thing is success in life and I want 
to show you how to succeed ; and in order to do this I 
want to review some of the standards of college success, 
that by considering them I may lead you to the true suc- 
cess of after life. St. Paul does not hesitate to speak with 
commendation of prizes, and I suppose I can do the same. 
They do it, he says, to obtain a corruptible prize ; we an 
incorruptible. 

I. 

The first standard of college success which occurs to 
our mind is in athletics. I once visited the club house of 
one of our national universities with an under-graduate 
who showed me the various silver trophies taken in the 
past. I was surprised at the awe and admiration with 
which he spoke of the men who had won those prizes. 
Their names were yet living ; indeed they were written 

(3) 



4 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 

in bronze upon the walls of the club house ; but I presume 
it would have taxed the memory of the undergraduate a 
good deal to tell me the name of the last winner of the 
Greek prize, or indeed if there were any Greek prizes at 
all ; those names had been written in water. 

Now, I am not sarcastic. This is perhaps as it should 
be ; certainly it is as it always has been. Away back in 
old Rome complaint was made that the people would not 
stay to see a new comedy of Terence because there was to 
be a contest of gladiators in the adjoining amphitheater. 
Men cannot help it ; to most men a prize fight, an athletic 
contest of any kind is the most alluring thing in the world, 
and while it is true, as has been said, that " full physical 
development and high intellectual development are, in the 
majority of cases, incompatible with one another, " yet 
everything is to be encouraged which tends toward the 
strengthening of the body in university life. The time 
has long since gone by when the preacher can afford to dis- 
regard the body, the temple of the Holy Ghost, or to set 
some other standard as the highest — some gaunt, thin and 
consumptive saint as the ideal. Such times have gone by 
now, and we realize that the young man who is strong and 
healthy will be better able to fight the prurient fancies and 
the demons of impurity, which haunt most men at some 
time during their life's journey. And if the body responds 
quickly to the stimulus of the cold bath, then intemperance 
will be less apt to seize him in its degrading and damning 
clutches. 

But when we have said all this, nevertheless, a word or 
two of warning can be spoken in regard to college athletics. 
In the first place the mercenary element should be elimi- 
nated. This has been steadily growing during the last 
twenty years. Now do not misunderstand me; I do not 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 5 

mean that the young contestants are mercenary, but the 
organization is. The college games should not be a time 
or place for making money ; the people should be the 
guests of the students and then the most objectionable 
features of college athletics would disappear. The young 
collegian ought not to be obliged to serve in the gymnasium 
for money, no, not even for his college or his athletic asso- 
ciation. I like the old time classic story that, when Xerxes 
had been told that he would have an easy task on the field 
of Marathon because the Peloponnesians were occupied 
with the Olympic games, he asked, " What prize does the 
victor receive?" And the answer being given that the 
prize was a wreath of wild olive, his nephew, who was 
standing by, burst out in spite of the displeasure of the 
monarch, " Heavens, Mardonius, what manner of men are 
these against whom thou hast brought us out to fight, men 
who contend, not for money, but for honor?" That spirit 
should actuate the whole field of college athletics. Away 
with gate money ; away with money for seats ; away with 
gambling ; away with all professional methods which 
characterize the so-called sport of the world. Let the 
college be the place where young men contend, not for 
money but for honor. 

And that will do away with the other objectionable 
feature, namely, cruelty. We want our young men to be 
plucky and courageous, but we do not want them to go 
into untoward danger in order to make a holiday for their 
friends. If the sport is dangerous, why then, the sight of 
it will demoralize the spectators. That is not always 
understood. Because I see young men go into a foot-ball 
match with all the courage of heroes that will not make 
me brave ; seeing some man lift a thousand pounds will 
not make me strong ; and yet it is the most common 



6 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 

popular fallacy, and students will gather not in hundreds 
as here, but by thousands, with banners and colors and — 
cigarettes and cheers to see eleven men do their athletics 
for them. And the result is that the courage is not to be 
found in the crowd, and sometimes those fine words of 
the Paracelsus occur to our mind as expressing the pos- 
sible feelings of the young heroes who make a holiday 
for their friends at, perhaps, the price of years of subse- 
quent suffering and incapacity. 

Have your will, rabble ; while we fight the prize 
Troup you in safety to the snug back seats ; 

And leave a clear arena for the brave 
About to perish for your sport. 

Now, the doing away with all this mercenary element 
will, I say, eliminate thoughtless cruelty and too intense 
rivalry. It is a fair picture I seem to see when the people 
come as guests of the college to see the games and from the 
time they arrive until they go away the word money is not 
once mentioned, any more than my host to-morrow evening 
will ask me to pay for the dinner to which he has invited 
me. And I do not think so ill of college men, as for a 
moment to suppose that the eliminating of these mercenary 
conditions will affect college athletics in any harmful way. 
Above your gymnasiums and over the gateways of your 
athletic fields, let me suggest a motto for the shield : 
" Non pecuniae sed honori." 

II, 

And this pecuniary element must be eliminated also out 
of the intellectual side of the college life. A great change 
has taken place in regard to a university career. In the 
old time a father, who could afford the comparatively 
modest sum, sent his boy to college that he might browse 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 7 

among the pastures and fields of literature and drink of the 
streams of learning which in those days crossed every col- 
lege campus. The boy's career, as a general rule, was not 
decided upon beforehand ; but, now-a-days, from the very 
beginning it is predestined and the consequence is that, as 
one strong English writer has said of Oxford, so we can 
say of our American colleges and universities, "they 
have been handed over to the specialists who have substi- 
tuted for the old liberal education a multitude of technical 
schools for the cramming of the memory and the starving 
of the intellect. The old education, whatever may have 
been its faults and its defects, was an education neverthe- 
less — not an apprenticeship." There is a great deal to be 
thought of here, and it is a question if our modern system 
is not killing the old ideal of scholarship. Indeed in my 
pessimistic moods I doubt whether it can ever be revived. 
The young men go to college to learn about electricity and 
wireless telegraphy and hydraulics and mechanics, not to 
learn to love the Homeric cadence as they do the rolling of 
the sea. The other night I listened to a young woman in 
a private house in the music room playing exquisitely on 
her violin. After she had finished I noticed she covered 
it over with some gauze-like material and laid it away in 
the case with reverent care. I asked if I might have the 
privilege of looking at it. It was all bruised, battered and 
mended. She told me the name of the German maker in 
the seventeenth century. I asked her how such a violin 
as that compared with those of the American workman- 
ship to-day. " Oh," she said, with the courtesy which 
one shows to the ignorance of a child, "you cannot get 
that tone out of a modern violin." My host, who is a most 
fortunate young business man, said, with some degree of 
warmth : " Do you mean to say that the American manu- 



8 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 

facturer cannot reproduce almost that identical violin, to- 
gether with its breaks, varnish and its mending." " No," 
she said, " it cannot be, such violins belong to the past," 
and she was right. So the question has occurred to me 
whether our modern colleges and universities can produce 
scholars like Charles James Fox or James Russell Lowell 
or J. Lewis Diman. The old atmosphere is gone. We can 
have specialists in Homeric study, specialists in Aryan 
philology but who can reproduce the men reared in the 
old quiet atmosphere, where the Homer and the Virgil and 
the mathematics had no bearing whatsoever on a future 
mercantile career? 

Now I do not say all this to discourage you. Indeed the 
modern specialist is too sure of himself to be an easy man 
to discourage. But it is possible to carry the self-sacrifice 
to the specialist too far. The man who spends all his time 
greasing the guns down in the hold of the ship is not the 
one to tell about the tactics of the battle. The analyzer of 
the insect's wing will not necessarily know about the beauty 
of nature ; and there is in scientific study by itself something 
narrowing unless it is supplemented by the study of the 
man, — of the humanities. The anthropologist will tell you 
about primitive man and his religion with all the dogmatism 
of the Calvinist ; the anatomist will tell you about the 
vertebrate, but the Bible will tell you about the man. And 
it is the student of the Bible who says, as one has recently 
said, that there is " in history a force which is, so far as we 
know, in no sense evolutionary and the law to which it is 
hard to find — the force of personality and of character." 

It is here that religion comes in and claims her own ; 
and she cannot be gainsayed. Be specialists if you can or 
will, but do not be slaves. Read your Bible, your Shake- 
speare and your Homer, so that you may learn to know 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 9 

much in regard to the nature of man, who is, as the Bible 
expresses it, " the Son of God." It is here that you have 
a duty to God with your intellect, and you can never per- 
form that duty if you shut yourself up in the narrow lines 
of modern scientific scepticism and turn away from all that 
great field of human interests and from the literature which 
our fathers read and loved and which fitted them to believe 
in Jesus' Revelation of God as the Father of all mankind. 

III. 

Now do you not see what is the true success of life ? 
Andrew Lang said that "the best things can not be 
taught. The universities give us leisure and books and 
companionship to learn for ourselves." So is it with this 
great truth which I have been trying to lead up to ; it can 
not be taught ; you must learn it for yourselves. But oh, 
there is nothing which offends me so much as the way in 
which that word "success " has come to be specialized in 
our American vocabulary. It is used only in the mercan- 
tile sense. The successful man is the man with a large 
bank account, no matter whether that bank account was 
gained by tricks or by fraud. There he stands ; and Amer- 
ican youth are being taught to look to him as their ideal. 
To gain this golden prize — men all around us are sacri- 
ficing their nobler, their better selves, are giving up love 
and home and leisure, are overtaxing their brains and 
laying perhaps the seed for future insanity, never dream- 
ing that after all it is only a base slavery. But the true 
success is when the man is master of himself ; when he 
will do the right, as God helps him to see the right, though 
all men be against him ; when he can see those around 
him growing richer and stronger every year without envy 
and without bitterness ; when he can die at last thanking 



IO BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 

God that he has never grown rich by crushing out the pity 
and the love in his heart, or influential by tampering with 
the truth of God. It is an old man with a worn coat and 
a small income but an honest heart who stands before 
me to-day, as I speak to you, as the truest example of suc- 
cess. 

I once stood before the picture of the crucifixion by 
Verestchagin. At first I was shocked, it seemed to me to 
go against all the principles of Christian art through all 
the ages, but at last a nobler thought dawned on my mind. 
In the picture it is only a Hebrew peasant dying on a 
cross. There is no attempt to idealize with beauty the 
head that was crowned with thorns. In the crowd are the 
richly dressed, the nobles and the priests, here and there 
amongst the rabble. Well, be it so. Take, if you will, 
away from the Man of Sorrows that divine look of beauty 
and of love which Fra Angelico and Guido and Raphael 
and all the greatest painters of antiquity have painted 
there. Try to sink, if you will, the greatest event of all 
history down to the level of a modern execution, yet you 
will, nevertheless, only have made the miracle of history 
the greater, for Jesus has conquered without any of the 
world's means of success. And has He not conquered? 
Judging even by a picture so barren of religious imagina- 
tion as this, has He not succeeded in the truest sense of the 
word? To be sure the high priests are there gloating over 
their Victim and every one of the world's historians would 
pronounce the word "defeat." The head that might have 
been crowned with gold is crowned with thorns ; the hands 
that might have grasped the scepter of the Caesars are 
nailed to the cross. And yet, forget the world and look 
once more at Calvary, and do you not see that by the 
standard of God the success is divine? For He alone has 



BACCALAUREATE SERMON. II 

conquered ; He alone has been true to his manhood ; He 
has been the Son of God even unto the end. " It is 
finished," He can say, " Father into thy hands I commend 
My spirit." Those two high priests in their rich dresses 
go back to their marble palaces and congratulate them- 
selves over the event of that day. Pilate's sympathy has 
been held in check, the people have been kept amused 
and interested and He, that Jesus, the defier of their power, 
the disturber of their temple, is dead. Ah, which is your 
ideal of success? Money, power, influence, social pres- 
tige all on the side of the Sanhedrin, but truth, holiness, 
righteousness, manhood, all on the side of Christ. Which 
is the successful life? It is with this thought that I would 
send you young men out to face the trials and troubles of 
life. I would that every man who graduates from an 
American college or an American university might have 
learned, whatever else he learned — might have learned 
the spirit of independence. Then you would go out to be 
true nobles, knights to fight in the cause of truth and love. 
And, as you leave this building to-day, may you hear 
above all the din and roar of the world outside, coming 
down through the ages from that Man Who died upon the 
cross of Calvary these words : " Take heed and beware 
of covetousness, for a man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth." " Who- 
soever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, 
he cannot be My disciple." 

Lore. 



